


On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages (Part 7)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [116]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Artificial Insemination, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Culture Shock, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, LGBT, Marriage of Convenience, Psi Corps, Same-Sex Marriage, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-02 23:33:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14555994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: The seventh part of a comprehensive essay on marriage in the Corps.What about LGBT telepaths?The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages (Part 7)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

Part 1 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14408412). Summary of Part 1: Arranged marriages in the Corps are not what you think, are not as common as you think, always involve consenting adults, and no one is _forced_ to marry or breed.

Part 2 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14539404). Summary of Part 2: Policies of genetic matching in the Corps were developed, in a "big picture" sense, to help protect Earth from future Shadow invasion. Most telepaths don't know about this, however, and so to them, these practices exist as part of a century of tradition, culture, and values.

Part 3 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544210). Summary of Part 3: Arranged marriages started in the MRA, under Crawford. They began as yet another policy by which normals attempted to make telepaths into a separate, subservient caste.

Part 4 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544645). Summary of Part 4: Vacit promoted and streamlined the arranged marriage/marriage approval system, and created the genealogy department, in order to promote telepath population growth and telepathic strength, and thus to protect Earth from the Shadows. This department can approve or deny marriages, but does not actually arrange them.

Part 5 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14550252). Summary of Part 5: Arranged marriages are a part of tight-knit telepath culture. (The essay focuses on the background to Bester's arranged marriage.)

Part 6 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14551104): Summary of Part 6: Students are prohibited from having sexual relationships while still in school, at least on paper (until graduation, until age 18 by normal age reckoning). They aren't fixed up with arranged marriages while in school - when this happens, it only happens later.

\-----

But what about LGBT telepaths? They exist - what happens to them?

Good question!

First, same sex marriage is legal in the Earth Alliance. ( _Rising Mars_ ).

Marcus and Franklin pretend to be married in _Rising Mars_ :

          "Most of the Resistance travel light, travel alone. So to get travel permits for the two of you together, well, our access to the Transit Bureau is limited to whatever we can steal. So you're Jim Fennerman and you're Daniel Lane. A young married couple on holiday to Mars for their honeymoon."

(A young couple who never got to go to Mars for their honeymoon, because the Mars Resistance stole their travel documents.)

Susan Ivanova and Talia Winters were also supposed to have an on-screen relationship, but this got pushed off-screen for various reasons.

So, how does the Corps treat same-sex marriages?

The marriage restrictions, recall, are Corps-side (they're not EA law till after the Telepath War, and are a little different in that time period, namely, they're aimed at preventing normals and telepaths from marrying, not preventing telepaths from marrying each other). These Corps restrictions were put in place so that telepaths (ideally) have children who are of equal or greater strength - that is the basis for screening opposite-sex marriages. If a couple doesn't fit into this box - they're same-sex partners, if they're both infertile, etc. - then there's no real basis for the Corps to block their marriage, so these marriages would be approved at a much higher rate.

The story doesn't end there, however. The Corps still cares about making genetic matches and telepath babies. ^_^

So while the Corps isn't likely to prevent a same-sex couple from marrying, they might still request/suggest that one or both partners have children (via IVF) with suitable genetic matches.

Basically, from a bureaucratic standpoint, everyone who is in a straight marriage goes into one database in the system, and everyone else (same-sex marriage and unmarried) goes into the other database.

  * If you're in the first database, whether you're trying for a baby or not, whether you're living together or separated, whatever your circumstances, the Corps won't ask you to have a child with a third party genetic match. You can _volunteer_ to do so, and some people do, but they won't ask it of you. (Like how they can't ask someone to do more than four deathbed scans. There are internal limits on what the Corps can ask of someone.)
  * If you're in the second database, then at some point, if a high genetic match is found, and you're both in that database, then you may be asked. Not _forced_ \- no one is abducted in their beds and dragged off - but asked.



So the conversation might go something like this:

          "We see you're unmarried. We've found a woman who's a high genetic match with you. Would you consider marriage?"

          "I'm gay."

          "Oh, OK." [talks it over with woman] "She's open to artificial insemination. Would you consider donating a sperm sample?"

The woman, obviously, can also say "no" to having his baby.

In the Corps, people of all sexual orientations do this kind of thing _all the time_. Every day. It's _very, very_ common: **more common, actually, than arranged marriage.**

 Deadly Relations, p. 185:

          Bester, after he's caught his wife cheating: "Why did you marry me?"

          Alisha: "You know why."

          Bester: "No. There was no need to marry. We could have conceived a child for the Corps - through artificial insemination, even. It's done every day. But you wanted to marry. Why?"

So the typical conversation would go something like this:

          [The Corps tells two people they're high genetic matches, and suggests they consider marriage. They talk about it.]

          "No, we don't want to marry each other. We're not compatible like that."

          "Would you consider artificial insemination?"

          [more conversation]

Again, people can say yes or no, but if the genetic match is high enough, there's social pressure to say yes. That's just what's done. The assumption is that if the Corps is asking this of you, the match must be _exceptionally_ high (as it was in the case of both Bester's arranged marriage and Talia's arranged marriage), so you'd need a good reason to say no, or else it's taken as being selfish. (A good reason might be, "I'm a Psi Cop and I just got assigned off-world and I can't deal with pregnancy right now." "Please consider this after your assignment.")

But remember, again I'm talking about _social pressure_ \- no one is dragging you out of bed and forcing you to do this. Do one is demoting you for not doing this. No one is firing you for not doing this. You may get some nagging, though.

And if you _volunteer_ , you get some brownie points from the higher ups.

When it comes to genetic matching, there are three levels bureaucratically:

  * Genetic match too low - match not approved
  * Genetic match moderate - match approved if parties request it
  * Genetic match exceptionally high - marriage or artificial insemination _recommended to parties_



And as I said, actual arranged _marriages_ are less common than arranged  _reproduction_ , and generally have to do with more than just genetic matching - the elders in the lives of these young people think they would make a good pair (whether they're right about it or not).

No one is _forced_. But it is a major culture clash - people not raised in the Corps might be quite shocked to find their supervisors, or administrators of their school, suggesting who they should marry or who they should have a baby with. They might be outraged by what they might feel was an intrusion into their "private, personal life." Outside the Corps, such suggestions are not a boss' place, or a teacher's place. In the Corps, "the Corps is Mother and Father," and that's what elders _do_. It's their duty as elders.

This is where the cultural misunderstandings come from.

(And the only "later" we see in canon who "gets it" is Bey, because he's Bey, the later who "out-Corps'd the Corps." Deadly Relations, p. 74-75: Bester, waking up in the hospital: "I'm lucky you found me. Thank you, sir, for saving my life." Bey: "Well, that is the function of the aged, Mr. Bester. Once we can no longer contribute to the race in a direct, genetic way, we keep our eyes on the young.")

The "intrusion" of elders in the relationships and reproductive lives of younger people leads to a culture clash. The Corps' interest in genetic matching is weird and foreign, and perhaps scary as well. The fact that the Corps is a government agency (even though it's also a lot more than that) scares many laters (and outsiders) even more. That's where all this THEY BREED PEOPLE LIKE PUPPIES! anti-Corps hysteria comes from.

Anyway, back to LGBT telepaths, when it comes to procreation, LGBT telepaths would be treated the same as every other telepath not in a straight marriage. They may be asked to have a child artificially, or they may not.

**Now, there also ways to circumvent this system.**

And no, I don't mean doing something crazy, illegal and dangerous like leaving the Corps. I mean how to work within the system to keep them off your back.

Most simply, people who want to avoid all this enter into approved straight marriages with friends (whether consummated or not), live together for a while, and separate. Guess what the Corps can do about it? Nothing. You're in the "straight marriage" database, and they don't spend time and money trying to track down all these people and see how those marriages are going. The Corps might have the biggest budget of any EA agency, but their resources are not infinite. People who know you/work with you will probably know what you're doing, but they probably won't (or can't) do anything about it.

(There are other advantages to getting married - if you're a Psi Cop, for instance, you will live in the communal barracks until promotion (at least four years, usually five or six) unless you're married. If you're married, you and your spouse get your own apartment.)

In other cases, people whose marriages fail just simply don't divorce. This is what Bester and Alisha Ross did. They were married for less than a year. She cheated on him, and they split up. But they didn't divorce - he assumes she must have filed for divorce during or after the Telepath War (when it was socially very difficult to remain married to him), but before that, she didn't. And why? Because it made the paperwork easier.

If either one had filed for divorce, the Corps might try to match them up with someone else, for marriage or a child. If they stayed legally married - even if they hadn't seen each other in _thirty-five years_ \- the Corps wasn't going to do a thing about it. (And they didn't.) And these were two P12s! The Corps left them alone. So unless they really wanted to marry someone else, there was no reason to divorce.

Life in the Corps is life in a system. You learn the system, and you learn your way around the system (in both senses).


End file.
